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Sunday, February 06, 2011

Some Sunday links

I know a few people sent me some that I misplaced, but here are a few:

The JCPA looks at what the Muslim Brotherhood wants - in its own words

Just Journalism on Egyptian attitudes towards Israel

British PM David Cameron has some surprisingly good things to say in this speech at the Munich Security Conference, but not quite good enough:
We have got to get to the root of the problem, and we need to be absolutely clear on where the origins of where these terrorist attacks lie. That is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism. We should be equally clear what we mean by this term, and we must distinguish it from Islam. Islam is a religion observed peacefully and devoutly by over a billion people. Islamist extremism is a political ideology supported by a minority. At the furthest end are those who back terrorism to promote their ultimate goal: an entire Islamist realm, governed by an interpretation of Sharia. Move along the spectrum, and you find people who may reject violence, but who accept various parts of the extremist worldview, including real hostility towards Western democracy and liberal values. It is vital that we make this distinction between religion on the one hand, and political ideology on the other. Time and again, people equate the two. They think whether someone is an extremist is dependent on how much they observe their religion. So, they talk about moderate Muslims as if all devout Muslims must be extremist. This is profoundly wrong. Someone can be a devout Muslim and not be an extremist. We need to be clear: Islamist extremism and Islam are not the same thing.
The problem is that such a distinction is not as easy to make as Cameron thinks. In the end, Islam is both a religion and a political movement (as was Christianity a few hundred years ago) and placing Western labels on it to create artificial distinctions when the adherents themselves do not is not helpful.

But at least he calls it Islamist terror, and not generic "terror."